His government made similar response earlier this month after Indian and Pakistani prime ministers reciprocated each other for resumption of talks.

Armitage, who is on a three-day visit to South Asia, pointed out at a joint press conference held with Pakistani Foreign Minister Khshid Kasuri that Pakistan and India have different perceptions of the core issues that impede the improvement of their relations.

He made a point by arguing that Pakistan regards Kashmir as the core issue while India thinks cross-border infiltration the core issue. What Armitage has mentioned may represent only one of the facts that make the Pak-Indo relations remain in a standoff.

Analysts here believe that among others, lack of sincerity and strong internal opposition also have lowered expectations of the United States.

As everyone knows, in the past five years, Pakistan and India have held two summits without any improvement of their relations. On the contrary, the summits were followed by serious setbacks.

The first summit held in February 1999 between Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif was followed by a serious conflict between Muslim "freedom fighters" and Indian forces in India-held Kashmir, while the second one held in July 2001 between Vajpayee and Pervez Mushrraf, then chief executive, nearly triggered a large-scale war between the two nuclear countries with one million soldiers deployed along the Line of Control.

Some analysts attributed the failure of summits to lack of sincerity and inadequate preparations. Some thought they were sabotaged by hard liners.

Therefore, it is not strange why the United States warned the two sides against the game of "one step further, two steps backward" when lauding the peace initiatives offered by Indian and Pakistani leaders this time.

The third reason why the United States remains "cautiously optimistic" is that Washington knows clearly the recent hectic interaction between Pakistan and India has met strong opposition in both countries.

In India, Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha and other senior officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party seem to adopt an unyielding attitude towards Islamabad. Sinha launched a rhetoric war early April when he argued that Pakistan qualifies for a preemptive strike. Indian hard liners, analysts say, may sabotage Vajpayee's efforts to resume ties with the northern neighbor.

In Pakistan, local media say the army and the opposition support Jamali's peace offers to New Delhi. However, Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal, the second largest opposition party that consists of six religious groups, proposed on Wednesday an aggressive policy on the Kashmir issue.

Pakistani scholars and observers affirm that Vajpayee waved olive branch during his visit to India-held Kashmir partly owing to US pressure or with an eye on the elections in 2004.

The United States, which has changed the polities of Afghanistan and Iraq in the past two years, may realize that it could not draw a road map for South Asia as it did in the Middle East or at least it knows the time is not ripe for it to play a decisive role.

Armitage stressed in Islamabad that Washington will not play as a mediator or facilitator between New Delhi and Islamabad though the Bush administration has put its foreign policy priority on the situation in the subcontinent after the fall of the Saddam regime in Iraq.

(Xinhua News Agency May 9, 2003)